A spectre is haunting Australia – the spectre of Gina Rinehart.
Not satisfied with simply being the world’s richest woman, Australia’s wealthiest person or the owner of several mines, Rinehart is on a mission to control what we think, read and listen to as well. And with a personal fortune of nearly $30 billion – more than the value of Fairfax, Channel Ten, the Seven Network, David Jones and Qantas combined – that is a far from insurmountable task.
Rinehart is living proof that it is wealth, not the ballot box, which ultimately shapes politics under capitalism. In the few short years since her latest foray into politics began she has proved herself able not only to make and break government policy, but prime ministerships as well, in a way years of angry letters penned by concerned citizens simply could not.
Her 2010 campaign against the mining super profits tax, which culminated in the “billionaire’s rally” in Perth (no, sadly that was not a Monty Python skit), played no small part in the ousting of Kevin Rudd two weeks later and the immediate announcement of the scrapping of the mining tax by the newly installed Gillard. The fact that the combined wealth of those at the rally would be greater than that of several developing countries, and was backed with a real threat to take that potential investment elsewhere, gave it a clout well beyond its numbers.
More recently, Rinehart’s very own policy writing department appears to be behind the introduction by the ALP of special legislation to facilitate low paid guest workers being brought in to work in her Roy Hill mine. An indication that in Howard’s notorious maxim “we decide who comes to this country and under what conditions”, the term “we” refers exclusively to the super rich.
But just stopping the communists in Canberra making her pay a bit of tax or decent wages is not enough for the world’s richest woman.
The Australian media, long resented by Rinehart for not being sufficiently pro-mining, is next in line to be bludgeoned into line by the country’s biggest walking bank account.
On this score, Rinehart is continuing a proud family tradition.
Mining magnate Lang Hancock, Rinehart’s father and a man so far to the right he made former QLD Premier Joh Bjeke-Pietersen look like a bleeding-heart liberal, famously abhorred the supposed left-liberal bias of the Australian media and the lack of due appreciation and respect it extended to billionaire mine owners like himself.
The difficulty he experienced in disseminating his views – which included advocating the poisoning of drinking water for Aboriginal people, blaming asbestosis victims for their plight and supporting a proposal to detonate a nuclear bomb in northern-WA to create a harbour to aid mining exports – proved simply intolerable.
In 1971, Hancock established The Independent, a WA-based weekly designed to give him more influence over public debate and politics, and in particular the WA Liberal government which he was feuding with at the time.
It was also a major mouthpiece for the nutty WA secessionist movement, in which he and Rinehart were active. Through The Independent (and later The National Miner), Hancock’s 1979 “Wake Up Australia” manifesto and more recently Rinehart’s mining lobby group, the pair have fought for the designation of north western Australia as a special economic zone where the mining industry rules, workers rights can be trashed, CO2 emissions are celebrated and Aboriginal people don’t exist.
The moves by Rinehart to gain greater influence at Channel Ten and within the Fairfax corporation are the culmination of this long-standing campaign.
But Rinehart represents more than just a maverick billionaire with a grudge. She in fact speaks for a significant section of the Australian ruling class, cohered mainly around the mining industry, which is pro-big business, anti-union, climate change denying, anti-government (except when it comes to subsidies for the mining industry) and which considers everything left of the Liberal Party, and possibly even some of them, to be no-good communists.
Rinehart’s lobby group, Australians for Northern Development and Economic Vision – otherwise known as CEO Billionaires for Slave Labour and Environmental Destruction – counts in its ranks 64 members, only nine of whom are not CEOs, company directors or presidents of companies somehow associated with the mining industry. Rinehart counts as her friends John Singleton, owner of noxious radio stations 2GB and 2CH, and right wing shock jock Andrew Bolt.
So while we may have learnt to tolerate The Australian (well, no one reads it anyway) the idea of this cabal, with Rinehart at its head, exerting more influence over the Fairfax corporation, the more liberal of the two major media blocks in Australia, is truly odious. The move has been widely criticised both for the political direction it would likely take Fairfax publications in, as well as for the threat it poses to media independence and by association liberal democracy.
Certainly, any extension of the reach of mining industry bosses and their right wing acolytes over the ideological apparatus of society should be strongly opposed by left wingers. A victory for the most aggressive arm of big business in Australia would be a setback for the workers’ movement and push the political climate to the right.
But the relative ease with which Rinehart has been able to buy her way into media influence highlights the limitations of any meaningful media independence under capitalism, and exposes the very narrow channels through which public debate flows in Australia.
Because while much of the media may be formally independent from the state, it cannot under capitalism be independent from capital and those who own and administer the system. Control of substantial wealth is required to found, build and maintain a media empire, and indeed any form of media outlet.
Control of wealth therefore gives those who wield it significant control over the dissemination of ideas and public debate – through direct editorial intervention, decisions about how and what information to present, and through the hiring and firing of journalists. This control of wealth also informs where those who wield it tend to stand in relation to these debates. A compliant working class, pro-business economic policies and a healthy dose of nationalism to wash it all down with, suit the media barons and their golf club mates as much as it does their old school mate politicians.
Far from formal media independence generating full and robust dialogue involving a range of independent political voices, it in reality provides an outlet primarily for the views of the rich and powerful.
In Australia, for example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd owns 70 percent of all print media outlets, while Fairfax controls virtually all the rest. Just five corporations dominate televised broadcasting, making the Australian media one of the most narrowly controlled in the world.
No wonder then that there exists a right wing consensus in favour of business, against strikes and almost every other idea which reinforces the status quo.
Of course there can be different editorial traditions within different media establishments – which are certainly not irrelevant – but these differences ultimately reflect the different individual prejudices of the owners or managers of the establishment. That Fairfax outlets have traditionally given voice to the more liberal arm of the bourgeoisie does not change the fact that it is a narrow, privileged and partisan clique of wealthy owners and managers who call the shots and whose proclivities the rest of us are hostage to. Never do the workers who do the printing, filming or distributing have a say, nor even most writers or journalists, let alone the rest of us.
And because none of the media barons, even the most liberal, have an interest in challenging the fundamental commonsense that prevails under capitalism – including that those who can pay deserve to control – they are ill-equipped to fend off Rinehart’s assault.
So while we will all breathe a sigh of relief if Rinehart fails in her bid to capture Fairfax, we should not be satisfied with those slightly further down the BRW rich list controlling what we hear and watch either. But to change that, we need to challenge capitalism.
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